Happy New Year!

As the festive season has all but finished, and we’ve all gorged on mince pies, left-over turkey and (probably) too much booze, so ends our third year of 12 Devs of Xmas, an annual festive round up of tutorials and articles on new and exciting technologies and tricks in the web-development world.

We had some amazing articles from 12 incredible authors (some of whom have written / spoken for us before) and for that, we are eternally grateful.

So let’s have a round up of the season shall we?

Day 1: Computing Education

Helen Armfield talks about the state of computing education for children today. With the new curriculum changes, coding is going to be taught from a much earlier age. But is this just a case of box-ticking, are we seeing these changes for the correct reasons, or is it sacrificing real education instead?

Day 2: Everyday Functional Programming

Tim Ruffles introduces us to the world of Functional Programming with some insights in to the main concepts. With examples from JavaScript, Tim explores some of the key ideas behind the programming paradigm allowing us to relate them back to things we do every day.

Day 3: Interaction Evolved

Ashley Nolan discusses the evolution of how we interact with the web. Taking a look back at the simplicity of the past all the way through to the more engaging methods seen today, Ashley explores this evolution showing some great real-world examples and ponders the potential future uses for these emerging technologies.

Day 4: Lets Make A Web Component

Returning author Ruth John shows us some new tricks with some future web technologies: web components! In this hands on tutorial, Ruth guides us through how to build a web component introducing new concepts like templates, the Shadow DOM, and custom elements.

Day 5: Are You Browsing Comfortably?

Steve Workman delivers a fantastic article on responsive design and how we should also be thinking of big screens when we complete our front-end builds.

Day 6: Reducing the Weight of Image Heavy Pages

Ian Feather takes a look at performance with a focus on image rich designs. Using a real-life case-study of the Lonely Planet website redesign, Ian takes a look at some of the techniques you can for some worthwhile performance gains.

Day 7: Caulking a Website, pre and post Launch Strategies

Simon Cox takes a detailed look at the art of Caulking a website. There’s always a lot of things going on around the launch of a site so some simple things could get easily missed. Simon takes a look at how you can go about making your website launches as tight as possible and preventing any unwanted leaks.

Day 8: Architecting your Front End Javascript

Jack Franklin is back talking JavaScript once more. This time, Jack takes a look at architecting JavaScript in your Front End site projects, looking not only at how to effectively plan the structure of new projects but also talking about looking back and refactoring old projects as well.

Day 9: Cool Uses I’ve Found for Icon Fonts

Harriet Pulford takes an interesting look at icon fonts. Icon fonts have become more and more common over the last year or so enabling us to enhance our user interfaces and hopefully create a better user experience. However in this article Harriet explores beyond the everyday uses, showing us what else can be created with some cool icon font experiments on the web today.

Day 10: Maintaining a Better Workflow with Grunt

Andi Smith takes a detailed look at improving your workflow with Grunt. Whether you’ve never heard of Grunt or even if you use it daily, in this article Andi will guide you through everything from getting started through to some handy tips on how to get the best out of Grunt in your projects.

Day 11: Creating your own Franken-Butler with Hubot

Rémy Bach takes you through how you can be the proud owner of your very own robot butler with Hubot. Fed up of searching Youtube manually or Googling for translations? Then this article is exactly what you need to create your very own robot to serve your every need and with some interesting add-ons too!

Day 12: Enhance your Themes with Hooks

Adam Onishi takes another look into some WordPress functionality, this time: how to enhance your themes with WordPress hooks. Hooks are one of the core factors that makes WordPress such a great platform, allowing developers to manipulate the functionality of the WordPress core without modifying the code itself.

And there we have it, 12 great articles to round off the festive period. We hope you enjoyed reading these and even playing with the code. If you’ve built something off of one of these articles, we’d love to hear about it!

Oh, and before we forget, are you interested in writing for us next year?